AMD goes ga-ga with dual core Athlon 64

@ 2005/02/23

CHIP FIRM AMD showed off a dual core Athlon 64 chip at its Sunnyvale plant yesterday, as the noise caused by the battle between the two firms, sometimes compared to Tweedledee and Tweedledum, becomes a blinking cacophony and racket.
Intel encouraged its staff at a sales conference last week to go "ga ga" for Smithfield, its desktop bi-cameral microprocessor which it is expected to show off at a Developer Conference in California next week.

CPUs are sometimes described as the "brains" of a computer, so obviously it's better to have two brains than one, although some think too many cooks spoil the broth.

Now AMD has decided to "ra ra" its own dual processor technology, in the shape of its 939 pin "Toledo" processor. AMD traditionally attempts to woo hacks attending IDF to see what it's up to. Last year, a limo it hired to take the journos to an alternative venue was shooed away by armed cops and Intel executives.

AMD said that its dual core Athlon 64s will have similar power characteristics to its single core chips. It also claims that the chips are manufactured using the same process and don't need new types of motherboards.

It claims that the dual core processors will let people burn CDs or DVDs while unzipping compressed files and encoding high resolution videos. µ